


A Smile Half-Deceased

by Strigoi17



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Canon Compliant, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-04
Updated: 2012-05-04
Packaged: 2017-11-04 20:23:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/397862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Strigoi17/pseuds/Strigoi17
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The dingy orange-grey sunlight hurt his skin.</p>
<p>It ate barbarically at him, the dim sunset, as he crunched across the frost-encrusted grass and dug his hands deeper into shallow pockets; searching for the subtle thigh-produced warmth seeping through his jeans like paint through canvas and dying his fists in heat.</p>
<p>He jerked his shoulders forward, and – feet hitting the ground in louder, harder strides – he clumped through acrid and tactile sunlight. Glaring at the air before him, he cursed his unresponsive Moirail. He damned to all Hell the lack of obnoxiously-typed indigo text berating his crabtop, and the petrified possibilities of Gamzee's spited blood storming back to hectic and terrifying boiling –</p>
<p>A blurred streak of blue hurtled to the ground before him with a startling thud.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Smile Half-Deceased

The dingy orange-grey sunlight hurt his skin.

It ate barbarically at him, the dim sunset, as he crunched across the frost-encrusted grass and dug his hands deeper into shallow pockets; searching for the subtle thigh-produced warmth seeping through his jeans like paint through canvas and dying his fists in heat.

He jerked his shoulders forward, and – feet hitting the ground in louder, harder strides – he clumped through acrid and tactile sunlight. Glaring at the air before him, he cursed his unresponsive Moirail. He damned to all Hell the lack of obnoxiously-typed indigo text berating his crabtop, and the petrified possibilities of Gamzee's spited blood storming back to hectic and terrifying boiling –

A blurred streak of blue hurtled to the ground before him with a startling thud.

Karkat hindered suddenly, onyx-black eyes following the chunk of sky plummeting to the ground until it thunked sickeningly onto the frozen dirt, and with an anxiety-triggered stutter in his blood blatter, he wondered how plausible it was to watch what he had just watched.

A thump echoed across the three feet severing them, and a groan that smacked around in Karkat's own chest bubbled up into the air from the blue mass.

"Oh fucking HELL no."

A spot of black peeked from what was now ridiculously obvious as a coiled pile of blue fabric.

Oh God.

John Egbert reared his head and a gave a brutal shudder. He shook wind-bedraggled hair from his naked eyes. "O-Owowowowow…" He glanced around, blinking blind eyes at what was no doubt a landscape of watered-down and smudged scenery.

The sun was peeling Karkat's skin – or so he almost wished – and his feet were freezing solid to the ground. The air around him was glacious, but the sun above him was searing and violent as it beat itself upon his shoulders.

The red blood took a deep breath, a breath so wide and so poisonous his lungs nearly popped like the stupid animation on wriggler cartoons. He and John weren't supposed to see each other yet, or if ever; in legible blurs or just sheaths of ivory and grey skin. Seeing John at that moment was inexplicably unstable.

But, knowing the human, John had probably charged headfirst into this; into a deathly predicament he now couldn't get out of. He had stuck himself into the cogs of their plans like twigs between a bicycle tire; a self-destructive roadblock.

He was splintering before Karkat's eyes.

He – despite the conscience crowing in his ears and the clammy sweat pearling on the back of his neck – walked toward the now completely upright 13-year-old.

"Egbert?"

"He-Hello? John spun animatedly on his heel and tossed his chin toward Karkat. The troll glared violently at John, who blinked baby blue eyes at the blotch of grey and black hovering before him. "I… who…?"

Karkat noticed, now, that – through the clarity-seeking contortion of a seraphic face – John was scared. His brows were raised upward in petrified black lines and his lips were turned down; his cheeks crinkled into valleys of worry lines ingrained upon his cheeks.

"…" Karkat rattled a breath through his scream-numbed throat. He strode closer to John, their chests a fingerbreadth apart.

John blinked harder, struggling to see through the unfocused haze his lack of glasses brought on. He guided forward his hand, and brushed cool-tipped, hammer-calloused fingers across Karkat's leathery cheek.

He bit his lip and stifled tears. He occupied himself with a mindgame.

"Lemme try to-to figure out who you are!!"

He stroked Karkat's skin with his index finger, and the Leader froze in place.

He was touching him. John's fingers were laid against him; his heat was melting away from his cheek and across John's fair, resilient skin. A small bud of fire ignited at the place where John's digit connected with him, and the heat feathered across his face.

"…You're a troll, right?" A laugh bubbled out from lips splintered in frigid wind sheen. "A dude? I mean, if you were like, an imp, I'd be kinda d-dead…" The laugh rattled around in Karkat's skull like a grime-skinned penny swallowed into a beggar's tin. It was forced, fake, and breakable between his ears; his scowl honed itself into spider web-thin lines sketched onto his forehead and splayed across the bridge of his nose.

"Oh my God." He scoffed up at the mostly blind boy. "I could be one ouyt of so many peple, Egbert! Chisel the rust off of your itty bitty fucking thinkpan, and—"

"Karkat?!" The edges of his lips turned upward.

"YES, Egbert!"

"I… oh." His face clawed its way toward a grin, but only slackened into an exhausted grimace.

Of course, Karkat's insides barked savagely. Why would you ever think, for any fraction of fucking time, that there would be a minute shard of the universe within which John would want to see you? Grey fingers combed through wiry bands, before realizing John couldn't see him anyway.

"At-at least there's someone left…"

Karkat's insides shifted and contracted rapidly.

"What are you RAMBLING ON, Egbert? And where are you glasses?"

John took a gallons-heavy breath and forced a shrug. "I-I broke them…"

The grey-skinned troll heaved a sigh himself, looking the boy up and down once. A build tal and thin as Gamzee, but with harsh significance and bluntness it lacked the power and rage flushing Gamzee's grey skin purple. Spidery, glass-boned and wax-paper-covered fingers; softly boned and wind-flushed cheeks and raven feathers for hair.

"…Will you tell me what's wrong, at all?"

John almost started at the sarcasm-naked question. The words were small and foreign; even in the ten minutes John had known him physically, he had thought Karkat to be as loudly spoken as he was online – but now the 13-year-old troll spoke, his voice was flickering in and out of ear-shot, satin against John's earlobes.

John knew this was a bad, bad reaction. The butterflies drifting in dainty circles below his ribs, the warmth in his fingertips giving a swift 'fuck you' to the climate, were both detrimental feelings at the sound of Karkat's voice.

"I…" He bit his lip hard: this wasn't something he should go around shouting about, especially to trolls. The words itching at his lips were off limits, forbidden, white hot and harmful. The weight of the words would surely shatter his impunity and make the fear utter fact.

Karkat watched John's lips twitch and yank downward, the sorrow veining, unfettered, into his cheeks in gaunt creases. He numbered his blessings and his demons as John's hand fell away and swung, metronome-esque, back to his side. He drunk in a burning hot breath, and – the hunkering sun now dying the clouds vibrant magenta miles above their heads – he returned John's touch.

He placed two shivering, unsure fingers at the pale, immaculate tip of John's chin, guiding the Heir of Breath's blind gaze downward in the hopes that maybe John could make out the saffron of his eyes. The gently chilled air waving over him agitated his skin nearly as much as the sun had.

"Egbert." The name he hadn't said aloud before now – a name wondrously spicy-sweet on his tongue –stuck quick to his lips and begged not to be released. John's eyes rolled downward hesitantly, and Karkat's skin itself howled at the gem-like film glistening over his irises.

"John, fucking stop it."

He nodded slowly again, giving the crooked ghost of a smile – a smile half-deceased and desperately brittle – to Karkat; as his upturned cheeks crinkled the corners of his eyes, tears dribbled over in excess, faceting down his cheeks and tickling Karkat's fingers.

"D-Da-Dave's dead."

Karkat's face screwed up, contorting as he fought for control over the lump in his throat.

"F-Fucking HELL, Egbert."

He yanked the taller close, shoving his nose into the smell of Autumn air thick in the folds of John's shirt. The human collapsed over the red blood. With wet keening, he embraced the boy back and sagged loosely around him, leaning his forehead on the top of Karkat's head.

"I-I can't anymore, Karkat…" John whimpered reticently, knees buckling.

Karkat could feel the tears pulse deep beneath the skin between his eyes. This just wasn't what he did-- Karkat didn't let people in, and he didn't delve into people. The moment when Karkat physically showed that he gave two flying fucks was the moment a bus full of kids died on impact with a cement truck.

"…I…"

Karkat looked up at the boy; making John's chin slip and for a moment plummet lower and bang against his chest.

This was stupid. So foolish and incendiary it made his eyes itch and sizzle and agitate. John's unfocused eyes collided cosmically with Karkat's, and for a moment they both became dead without dying: their breathing desisted and all tremors in their chests became elusive and nonexistent.

John couldn't see a molecule of him clearly, and Karkat knew this damn well – but from the arch in his brows, he supposed John could feel him.

Karkat's fingers threaded swiftly and abrasively into John's hair. With rough-skinned and quaking fingers resting behind curved, pallid ears, he guided the taller's head lower.

"…"

"Karkat…"

The moan that writhed from John's lips was half vexed and half craving. Karkat's eyes followed John's lips as they murmured and he solicitously swiped his tongue across his own; before raising himself upward pitifully on his toes and yanking John lower.

For a moment, John was scared.

He was petrified.

He was quaking and frozen in place against Karkat's lips.

Karkat, at the least, was warm. His lips were abnormally and unexpectedly delicate and exhilarating, and the fingertips tickling the skin behind his ears were oddly docile.

With a nauseating and confusing mix of self-loathing and excitement, John kissed him back. With a slight craning of his neck, the Heir of Breath pressed his lips awkwardly against Karkat's, relishing in the pomegranate taste the upper lip between both of his emitted.

The troll yanked away from a mouth that tasted like the sun setting above them, shaking violently. "…John—"

"Don't." The boy shook his head unremittingly.

He half-extended a hand, raising his left only half a foot from his side. At that toothpick-sized sliver of time, John thought about everything; about unresponsive best friends and the berserk near-death experiences.

The Heir of Breath reached out an unsteady hand, dying only for the feel of the enemy's fingers sheltered within his own.


End file.
